Strategic Product and Brand Design Leadership: Pioneering Growth and Innovation in Payment Solutions, Prompting Acquisition Discussions with Mastercard

EngageFT delivered a swiftly deployable financial technology platform, building and managing next-gen digital payment solutions and programs.

After three years of discussions with CEO Jim, I joined Engage Financial Technology in mid-2017 as the head of design. My mandate was clear: foster a design-thinking culture across the company and completely overhaul our product suite and administrative tools. In just three years, I built a dynamic team of four creatives, revamped our brand identity, and established a centralized product pattern library. Through intensive research and testing, we transformed our core product offerings, streamlining program development and launch timelines. Launching over ten payment card programs, tailored to each project's unique needs. This transformation fueled rapid business growth, securing $11.25 million in Series A and B financing and adding over twelve new clients. Collaborating closely with strategic partners like Mastercard, we even explored acquisition talks. Our success in defining, designing, and selling programs to industry giants like ADP, Amazon, and United Healthcare underscored the impact of our product strategies. Key to our evolution was the creation of a multi-user developer portal and a robust backend administration tool, bridging client needs with seamless end-user experiences. This journey highlighted the vital role of design thinking, culminating in my promotion to Chief Experience Officer.

My Responsibility Highlights

• Collaborated closely with our CEO, COO, and CTO to strategize and plan across all programs, products, and teams
• Lead our internal cross-functional teams in development, operations, and program management to ship, manage, and optimize end-to-end payment solutions
• Owned product design for the end consumer and client admins
• Owned brand and marketing
• Supervised 4 in-house designers and 4 external agency designers

Corporate Branding & Marketing

- Rebranded, implemented, and maintained the entire corporate brand
- Designed and developed all marketing touchpoints, including the companies corporate website

My Business Impact Highlights

• Partnered with business development to secure a deal with Mastercard in under a month, which is what gave the company the funding to bring me on board full-time
• Key contributor in taking our signed client programs from 2 to 14 within the first year
• Rebranded, implemented, and maintained the entire corporate brand, 2-times
• Built the corp. micro-site
• Defined and conceptualized the 3 levels of programs to increase our business value from 1 offering into 3
• Designed all investor, marketing, and sales material
  •  Micro-site
  •  Investor decks
  •  Sales pitch decks
  •  Business cards

Partnered with business development to secure a deal with Mastercard in under a month, which is what gave the company the funding to bring me onboard full-time

Defined and conceptualized the 3 levels of programs to increase our business value from 1 offering into 3

High-level areas I led across our platform

Designed a micro-site for an advanced credit specific white-label program

Created all business development visioning presentations to lock each partner in our business development phase

Designed the grouping strategy for program types and visualized how they are configured per program

My Product Impact Highlights

• Assessed, tested, and entirely redesigned our core product offering and roadmap within the first 6 months
  •  Web and mobile apps
  •  Multi-tenant ecosystems
  •  Configurable and modular for client customization and branding
  •  Printed materials: payment card, card carrier, activation sticker, etc.
• Conceptualized our product to enable 2 additional business units - going from prepaid only, to adding debt and credit capabilities
• Defined our most common use cases into predefined programs
  •  Helping clients apply all the learnings and best practices we’ve gained overtime launching multiple programs
  •  Speeding up program planning for a full pilot launch from 6-9 months to 2-3
• Built all front-end marketing sites to maximize our web development
  •  Decreasing time to stand up a program using a no-code solution like Webflow
  •  Enabling critical dev resources to focus on the signed in web-apps that needed to be in parody with the native mobile app experiences)
• Initiated, and art directed, a senior designer to design our Developer Portal to rapidly speed up development and new hires by having a centralized place for all platform documentation
• Redesigned, and worked with development to rebuild, our existing Customer Service and Program Management Portals to enable a streamlined experience for our clients and internal customer service reps
• Drove, and designed, combining the 5 separate web portals into 1, auto-configuring by auth credentials
  •  Decreasing resources needed to build and manage each
  •  Decreasing time-to-task for admin users using consistent navigation and common components)

Created an atomic design system and applied to different levels of configuration to setup client branded programs faster and at scale

Collaborated with client's product teams to do, and apply, research and learnings unique to the client's use cases

Created a high-level release roadmap, and a data matrix, for the main planner feature for one program

Created the app IA and how the app sections correlate with the data matrix

Branded and configured enrollment custom per each program

Detail view for the two main features of a program that worked together, tying enrollment and setup with ongoing use

Details showing the home dashboard and how the program specific features were also surfaced onto the main landing page

My Team Impact Highlights

• Influenced, and reinforced, hiring across all roles, helping scale our internal resources from 10 to 76 within the first year
• Built out, and managed, an internal product design team of 3 senior designers, focused on internal tools, sales, and marketing, within 6 months
• Successfully integrating product design into an existing development team by establishing a common language and set of building blocks
• Identifying a way to take our teams to the next level, I initiated and migrated all designs and processes to Figma
  •  Establishing a centralized pattern library
  •  Reducing friction and speeding up cross-functional collaboration from days to hours or even minute's
  •  Speeding up new feature development by more than 50%
  •  Decreased the time to standup a base end-to-end branded program from 6-9 months to 1-2 days

Managed a senior designer to design, and work with devs to build, the developer portal for internal and external devs to reference our APIs

Managed a senior designer to design, and work with devs to build, a Program Configuration and Admin Portal so our partners could have full control to set and modify their own programs, enabling less support staff and faster program configurations

Managed a senior designer to design, and work with devs to build, a customer support portal that had scripted workflows for support and a full ticketing experience for internal and partners

High-level view of the information architecture I designed for our client Admin Portal that used Role Based Access Controls (RBAC) - User Types, Roles, and Permissions.

My User Impact Highlights

• Utilizing an optimization engine to track user engagement, and identify opportunity areas within live programs, I was able to establish program performance improvements, the first year
  •  Enrollment Rate (%):  +61%
  % of users who start enrollment who complete enrollment successfully (33% vs. 53%)
  •  Activation Rate (%):  +30%
  % of enrolled cards that activate their card (46% vs. 60%)
  •  Monthly Bank Loads ($):  +348%
  The average $ load via external bank transfer ($126 vs. $563)
  •  Cancellation Rate (%):  -93%
  % of the total active card base that cancels in a month. (6.1% vs. 0.4%)
  •  Diminished ATM Use ($):  -37%
  The average amount withdrawn from an account at an ATM in a month. ($538.76 vs. $341.21)
  •  App Engagement (#):  +24%
  The average number of app logins per user in a month (8.9 vs. 11)
• Partnered closely with our clients’ internal teams, ranging from 2 to 20+, I had the opportunity to impact millions of people

Utilizing an optimization engine to track user engagement, and identify opportunity areas within live programs, I was able to establish program performance improvements, the first year

Partnered closely with our clients’ internal teams, ranging from 2 to 20+, I had the opportunity to impact millions of people